First unvaccinated rabies survivor shares story

By Don Finley :
June 21, 2012
: Updated: June 21, 2012 11:14pm

Jeanna Giese sits down before speaking at a public health meeting Thursday June 21, 2012 at the Crown Plaza Hotel. Giese was bit by a bat when she was 15 and was the first known unvaccinated human to contract rabies and survive due to treatment.

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The first thing that went wrong that day eight years ago was that Jeanna Geise and her mother went to the wrong church for a school function, then decided to stay for Mass. The second thing was the bite from a rabid bat.

In the weeks that followed, Geise, then 15, a sophomore from a small town in Wisconsin, underwent an experimental treatment and became the first known unvaccinated person to survive the disease. Five more people since have been successfully treated, although two died of unrelated complications.

“The girl who lived,” she said laughing, referring to Harry Potter. “People around the world know me now. They friend me on Facebook. It's just opened up an opportunity for me to start educating people about rabies.”

On Thursday, she and Dr. Rodney Willoughby Jr., an infectious disease specialist who, after some outside-the-box thinking, came up with a remedy, spoke in San Antonio at the annual James Steele Conference on Diseases in Nature Transmissible to Man.

Geise couldn't help noticing the bat that started swooping through the church during the service eight years ago.

“All the parish was swatting at it with their hymn books and hats,” she said.

When an usher swatted the creature to the floor, Geise picked it up by the tip of each wing and carried it outside. As soon as she stepped through the door, the bat sank a fang into her left forefinger and refused to let go. She flung it into a nearby tree.

Within three weeks she started getting sick, beginning with flulike symptoms, fatigue and a tingling in her left arm. Then came vomiting, double vision and loss of coordination.

She has no memory of the month she spent in the hospital after she was diagnosed. But Willoughby was thinking through the progression of rabies and consulting with colleagues on a possible course of treatment.

“We had to devise a strategy to quickly figure out what we might do to treat this, and I decided not to try to read how to treat rabies,” he said. “There were a lot of articles on how to treat it, but no one survives — so why read those?”

After settling on the fact that the virus causes the brain and its neurotransmitters to go haywire, leading to death, he decided to put Geise in a medically induced coma to halt the process and provide antiviral drugs — hoping it would give the immune system time to attack the infection.

Her parents approved.

“Jeanna's parents were remarkably altruistic in recognizing this was going to be a fatal disease, and maybe we could do something where we could learn something for the next person,” Willoughby said. “Sort of by releasing Jeanna, essentially I think they got her back.”

Jeanna was left with a host of neurological problems that required two years of physical, occupational and speech therapy, and she still faces struggles. She recently earned a bachelor's degree in biology and frequently speaks about rabies at schools and to groups — including an advocacy group for bats.

“I love bats more than ever,” she said. “It's the disease, not the animal's fault. I never associated the bat with rabies. The bat was just a carrier.”